5.3 on latitude d600?

Clement Twine clem.twain at gmail.com
Mon May 2 05:23:45 PDT 2005


Stijn Hoop wrote the following on 05/02/2005 10:24 AM:
>>>> has anyone installed freebsd 5.3 on a dell latitude d600?
>>>> have the following worked "out-of-the-box"?
>>>> 
>>>> WiFi:	Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter
>>> 
>>> Not out of the box but there's a driver in -CURRENT for it: 
>>> iwi(4). There is a version for 5.3 on Damien Bergamini's
>>> website afaik (google for it).
>> 
>> ok, but this laptop is like - 3 years old? anyway, i'll look
>> there.
> 
> This is due to a lot of circumstance, most of it political:
> 
> - at first every wireless vendor refused to release programming 
> information, except for a select few. - now, although the
> programming information is out in the open, Intel refuses to
> release the needed firmware for the chipset under a license that
> is compatible for open source projects to include it
> 
> these two facts do not help regular driver development. In fact,
> the original author of the BSD drivers for Intel wireless chips
> is also the primary author of the cooperative Ralink Technology
> chipset driver; given a choice it would be wise to choose a
> wireless adapter with that chipset over the Intel ones.
> 
> Anyway you don't really have a choice, just explaining why things
> are as they are.

you are right here actually. But thanks for the info. Question is -
these drivers exist for Linux, is it not the same programming
information from Intel that was used to develop the Linux drivers?

>> My major concern is suspend to RAM. I use FreeBSD, but not on
>> my laptop so far. Looks like i have to wait a while for the
>> ACPI to fully 'mature' on freeBSD ;) I *hate* having to
>> shutdown my laptoy :)
> 
> Just try it out. 5.4 has a lot of improvements and I haven't
> tried suspend in a few releases so maybe you're in for a nice
> surprise.

This could be something to try anyway. Problem is that my laptop's
BIOS does not support APM - which am sure could have worked well.

Clem


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